Rant: the 3 episode rule is bad advice and it cost me 14 hours

I tried the 3 episode rule for a full season of shows I had been putting off, and it burned me. From January to March I stuck with 9 different series past episode 3 because people swear the payoff is coming, and 6 of them never got better. I spent about 14 hours on one show alone waiting for it to click, and it just kept dragging the same arc out. Now I drop anything that bores me in the first episode, and I have watched more anime in two months than I did all of last year. The rule assumes every slow start is building to something, but a lot of the time a slow start is just a slow show. Does anyone here actually track which shows paid off after 3 and which ones wasted your time?

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robert_jones26d ago

That really sucks, sorry you went through that. 14 hours on one show is brutal, and the worst part is you kept going because people promised it would get good. Been there too many times. The 3 episode rule works for some stuff but not everything, and nobody warns you that some shows are just slow the whole way through. Honestly tracking it sounds smart, I wish I had kept a list because I forget which ones actually paid off versus which ones I just kept watching out of stubbornness.

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